Mark your calendars, and get ready to go exploring: The release ofFedora 16, codenamed "Verne," is scheduled for release in earlyNovember. Fedora is the leading edge, free and open source operatingsystem that continues to bring everyone fresh, innovative featureswith each release, delighting users worldwide every six months.

We are proud to announce the availability of the Beta release of Fedora 16.

Come see why we love Fedora so much. We are betting you will, too.Download it now:

The Beta release is the last important milestone of Fedora 16. Onlycritical bug fixes will be pushed as updates leading to the generalrelease of Fedora 16 in early November. We invite you to join us inmaking Fedora 16 a solid release by downloading, testing, andproviding your valuable feedback.

This release of Fedora includes a variety of features both over andunder the hood that show off the power and flexibility of theadvancing state of free software. Examples include:

* System Boot. Fedora 16 introduces GRUB2, the long-awaitednext-generation boot-loader for Linux. GRUB2 automatically recognizesother operating systems, supports LVM2 and LUKS partitions, and ismore customizable than the previous version. In this release, only x86systems with a BIOS uses GRUB2 by default. Work is ongoing for makingGRUB2 the default for other architectures and systems.

* Services Management. Fedora 15 introduced the Systemd servicesmanagement program. This release features better integration ofSystemd via conversion to native systemd services from legacy initscripts in many software components -- for desktop users, this meansfaster boot times; for system administrators it means more powerfulmanagement of services.

* Desktop Updates. The two major desktop environments have beenupdated to the latest releases: KDE Software Compilation 4.7 and GNOME3.1 development release.

* SELinux Enhancements. SELinux policy package now includes apre-built policy that will only rebuild policy if any customizationshave been made. A sample test run shows 4 times speedup on installingthe package from 48 Seconds to 12 Seconds and max memory usage from38M to 6M. In addition to that, SELinux file name transition allowsbetter policy management. For instance, policy writers can takeadvantage of this and write a policy rule that states, if a SELinuxunconfined process creates a file named resolv.conf in a directorylabelled etc_t, the file should get labeled appropriately. Thisresults is less chances of mislabeled files. Also, from this releaseonwards, selinuxfs is mounted at /sys/fs/selinux instead of in/selinux. All the affected components including anaconda, dracut,livecd-tools and policycoreutils have been modified to work with thischange.

* System Accounts. Fedora now standardizes on login.defs asauthority for UID/GID space allocation, and has moved boundary betweensystem and user accounts from 500 to 1000 to match conventionsfollowed by several other Linux distributions. Upgrading from aexisting release will not be affected by this change and you can usekickstart to override this change during installation if necessary.

* HAL Removal. HAL, a hardware abstraction layer which has been adeprecated component for several releases, has been completely removedfrom all Fedora spins and DVD. Software components using HAL havemoved over to using udisks and upower as well as libudev for devicediscovery. This results in faster system bootup and faster startup forapplications depending on device discovery.

* Cloud Updates. Fedora now includes a number of new and improvedfeatures to support cloud computing, including HekaFS, a "cloud ready"version of GlusterFS, including additional auth*/crypto/multi-tenancy;pacemaker-cloud, application service high availability in a cloudenvironment; and IaaS implementations such as Aeolus and OpenStack.

There are many ways to contribute beyond bug reporting. You can helptranslate software and content, test and give feedback on softwareupdates, write and edit documentation, help with all sorts ofpromotional activities, and package free software for use by millionsof Fedora users worldwide. To get started, visithttp://join.fedoraproject.org today!